The Defender of Time - In Depth

The second part and resolution of Time Lock, the blogger post from last time would cover a lot of it, but I wanted to take some time to talk about the Time Defender. I wanted him to feel like a Golden-Age hero, someone you could feasibly see on a hero line-up, but not someone that people would normally walk up to and thank for saving the city. Sort of like Gray Ghost, Sandman, or the Question from DC, or Detective Fantôme and Night Raven from Marvel, or even Lobster Johnson from Dark Horse.

Visually (With my words) I wanted to take cues from Steampunk like sources, but the armor and costumes for them are far too intricate and would have too much detail for something that the Time Defender would wear. He's an android with time magic (And some other magic? I was kind of loose with his powers...), he doesn't care about aesthetics, and would only care about something that would be durable and useful.

I wanted him to be like some of the above mentioned heroes, a little like the old noir detectives, and a little like Noximilien from Wakfu (Except only seeming to be evil instead of actually evil).

Dana Andrews as Detective Mark McPherson in Laura (1944) (Top Left), Detective Fantôme from Marvel Comics (Top Right), the Question from DC Comics (Bottom Left), Noximilien Coxen from Season 1 of Wakfu (Bottom Right).

All in all, he would end up looking more like Rogue Bot by artist Ari Targownik (Gallery Source).

(Except with some plain-ish bronze armor as well :P)

To the actual chapter, I wanted another attempt at reality warping to happen to the group, but this time having them being completely/somewhat aware of what's going on. (Which almost immediately puts an end to it.)

And the reason I had the fight end the way it did, was because usually when there's a fight between two heroes or two hero factions, it always ends before any damage can be done, and I wanted to subvert that sort of trope, in that the fight goes on until there's a winner, and then the mistake is caught afterwards.

Without a doubt, this is probably the most effort I've poured into one of my In Depths about a chapter, which isn't a bad thing, because I've been skimping on some of these and they've been getting a lot shorter. I'm trying to take a new approach to it, trying to be more open about what inspires me to do certain things and not forgetting a lot of the whys (Which happens a lot more than it should). One way I'm doing this is by taking notes as I'm writing the chapters, because there's often months in between me finishing a chapter and posting that chapter, so that I can keep up a consistent schedule, and if things need to be rearranged, I can do it fairly painlessly early on, before the chapters that need to be rearranged/changed can go up.

Even this chapter was changed as late as a few days before being posted up. Could you imagine posting something up, and then having to retcon it, working around it, or having to go through with something that doesn't need to happen for another five to ten chapters? It would be a real pain to try to go back on what I've already posted.

There's only one planned update next month, but that might change to two. (Don't hold your breath though. :P)

-EDR